1. Field of Invention
This invention pertains to method and apparatus for the automated scheduling and placement of numerous telephone calls.
2. Prior Art and Other Considerations
For many businesses, telephonic communication is now the foremost mode of contacting customers, clients, or other patrons. Businesses which must contact a large number of persons generally employ skilled human operators, often salespersons or account managers, for making and handling the telephonic contact. The operators may call an existing potential customer for such purposes as to promote a new product, to resolve billing or payment issues, or to gather research or market information, for example.
Years ago the human operators were provided merely with a list of names and telephone numbers, and a telephone upon which to place telephone calls. Nowadays, several human operators are usually each situated at individual computerized workstations (or "terminals") equipped with a CRT screen, a keyboard, and a telephone audio headset. Through an automated process, other centralized equipment places (e.g., selects, dials, and monitors) each telephone call and, when a call is answered, connects one of the operators to the answered telephone line.
In relatively advanced prior art systems, known as predictive dialing systems, the centralized equipment determines the frequency at which calls should be placed in order to optimally utilize the human operators. In this regard, a pacing scheme or the like is employed so that the human operator will not spend much time listening to ringing telephones, busy signals, and the like.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,989,899 to Norwich discloses a telephone scheduling system wherein a control unit receives telephone number-inclusive code words from storage and transfers the code words to a plurality of registers. The control unit further directs one of the registers to transmit (via a switching unit) the telephone number of its code word to a single, automatic dialer shared by all the registers. The automatic dialer places the call on a telephone system, which includes a signal generator for generating a signal indicative of the status of the dialed line. In accordance with the generated status signal, through the switching unit the control unit functionally couples a register with an available operator station and the answered telephone line with the available operator station.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,599,493 to Cave shows a host computer which extracts a group of telephone numbers from customer data records and sends the telephone numbers to a central controller of telephone control system. The telephone control system makes and monitors the telephone calls. For answered calls the control system connects an operator audio unit to the answered telephone line, and sends the telephone number and operator terminal identification back to the host computer. The host computer controls the operation of the operator terminals. Updating of customer record information from the operator terminals occurs directly to the host computer.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,894,911 to Szlam et al. discloses a mainframe computer which sends batches of customer account information to a system controller via a data controller. The system controller directs trunk interface units to dial the customer's telephone number and monitor the status of the outgoing calls. When the appropriate trunk interface unit advises the system controller that an outgoing call has been answered, the system controller ultimately directs a switch to connect the answered trunk to an available operator terminal, and supplies abbreviated customer account information to the terminal. The operator terminal can then requests the full customer account information from the mainframe computer via the data controller.
A prior art system known as the Teledirect CTS-515 comprised a command center connected to a plurality of operator terminals or workstations. Each workstation had a dial/monitoring board as well as its own on-board processor. The command center included a data base of customer records. The command center periodically sent each processor entire data records for a batch of customers. Each terminal processor extracted the telephone number from a data record and directed the dial/monitor board to place an outgoing call. When a response was detected to an outgoing telephone call, the operator whose workstation placed the call was notified. The operator could then either take the call, or put the call on a network for another operator to answer.
In prior art telephone scheduling systems such as those described above, both the dialing apparatus and the operator terminal have functioned as slaves under the control of a centralized unit (labeled by such terms as "control unit", "system controller", "host processor", or "command center". Paths of data flow under the control of prior art centralized units do not afford optimum efficiency and organization for a predictive dialing system.
Moreover, of the prior art telephone scheduling systems which utilize multiple dialers, all dialers were under the control of a common centralized unit, which inaccurately affects the pacing scheme.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide method and apparatus for affording greater efficiency in the automatic dialing of telephone calls.
An advantage of the present invention is the provision of an automatic telephone dialing apparatus wherein a plurality of independent, intelligent dialers can simultaneously operate with respect to one or more sources of account information records.